Chrysalis
by Serendipity1
Summary: He woke up in a strange room, and she was there to greet him. Neither of them remembered who they were and what had passed before their arrival in the hospital. Healing is hard even in the best circumstances. Mikage and Utenacentric. WIP
1. Prelude: Sommeil

**Chrysalis**

Prelude: _Sommeil_

* * *

_Darkness._

She opened her eyes to mere slits, allowing the tiniest amount of sight possible. She felt-

And suddenly every physical sensation rushed back to her, causing her to open her mouth in a silent scream. There was intense pain, pain everywhere. It kept her from even moving, even _breathing_. She _felt _the blood pouring from her wounds; wounds that seemed to be everywhere on her body. Blood flowed into her eyes, half blinding her as she stared at the moon, now gone scarlet.

She took a breath, her body shuddering as she took in a ragged gasp of air, the simple motion creating even more agony in her wrecked body,

"Ah," she murmured, and then finally, mercifully, passed out in exhaustion.

* * *

_11:00 P.M_

_A stretch of grass, shining blackly in the thin moonlight. A thin strip of pavement, ghost-pale against the dark green of the grass, sparkling with broken glass from long-gone bottles. Wisps and strands of long, pale hair flowing over both. Black fabric and pale skin, covered with what seems like hundreds of slashes. Smears and blotches of dark crimson over both grass and concrete._

_And the sound of a woman's scream, echoing through the night. Terrified. Horrified. Anguished._

"_Someone help! Someone call the police! Oh my god, oh my god-" The words trail off suddenly as the owner of the voice crumples to the ground, hands covering her mouth as she trembles, staring at the scene before her in horror._

"_Ashiya! What's happened?" A deeper voice, footsteps echoing hollowly on the concrete as a man runs towards the woman, concern fills his voice as he draws nearer. When he spots the shape lying crumpled in the grass, he lets out a sharp gasp. "Christ…what happened to her?"_

_The woman says nothing. And when the ambulance arrives, she still says nothing as the girl is loaded onto the stretcher and carefully pulled inside. _

_As the ambulance drives away, the blood stains fade away and vanish._

_11:45 P.M_

"_She's alive." The medic says, his voice thick with shock and bewilderment, as he examines the frail body before him. _

"_What?"_

"_She's still breathing. Pulse is normal."_

"_But how? With wounds like-"_

"_The wounds seem to be healing at an advanced rate. Bleeding has stopped completely."_

"_Gracious." The female medic examines the body with no little amazement. Her hands examine previously wounded areas, eyes widening at what she finds. "Amazing. With the amount of blood she must have lost, not considering the extent of these injuries, she should be dead or very close to it."_

"_What should we do? We have no knowledge of her guardians, no idea where she came from. We probably will not know until she awakens."_

"_We'll have to keep her in the hospital for at least a week, given that her healing rate stays at this level. Tell me, Shido, does she look familiar to you?"_

"_It's hard to tell beneath-" a pause. "It's hard to tell, but she seems to resemble…" The man trails off as he stares at the resting figure before him._

"_Yes, I think so too."_

"_Family resemblance?"_

"_How on Earth am I supposed to know? It's not like he can tell us."_

_The ambulance passes on into the night, ignored by the people driving their cars, un-noticed for the most part as it makes its way to the hospital, some thirty miles from the school of Ohtori._

* * *

_drip_

There was a sound, breaking into his rest, shattering the peaceful darkness of his fragmented thoughts. Water. The sound of a single drop of liquid coming to rest among a pool. The sound of a tear hitting the surface of a glass of water.

_drip_

There was something vaguely familiar about that single, insignificant sound. Something comforting, yet frightening about the tiny, unassuming noise that irked him, that unbalanced his peaceful state of mind. What was it?

_drip_

The sound reverberated through his ears, echoing through his mind, opening tiny streams of memory that trickled through and wisped away, leaving him confused and slightly shaken. A red glow illuminated the space before his eyelids, indicating the presence of bright light. Sunlight?

He stirred very slightly, feeling weak and drained, as if he had slept for years without ever waking up. He opened his eyes a crack, and blinked at the brilliant rays of the sun that hit him square in the face. Where was he?

A face blocked his vision, thankfully shading his eyes from the too-bright sunlight, and for a moment, he was caught in the dubious stare of the person obstructing his view. He blinked, unnerved at the intense scrutiny of the girl before him. She was pale to the point of ghostliness. Her eyes were crystal blue, and they shone luminously in the sunlight.

"Are you awake?" the girl asked in a semi-hushed tone, almost squinting at him, acting as if he were a sleeping parent whom she must not disturb. Her mouth had dropped open the instant he opened his eyes, and she was sneaking quick glances at the door.

'I think so," he replied dryly, aware of the hoarseness of his voice, "Or I am having more realistic dreams than usual." _Usual? What was usual? Where was he? What was this?_

Her mouth drew into a tight line at the cynical comment, and she stepped back, allowing him to observe the rest of her. She was dressed entirely in black, and had chosen clothing that covered everything but her hands and face. Her fair hair was cropped short, and it hung in her face, brushing her cheeks and obscuring her eyebrows.

"Ah, yes," the girl said, in a tone that matched his earlier remark, "The once-over." She crossed her arms and gave a slight smile, but her expression was overlaid with a different emotion that he couldn't quite place. Shock? Hope?

He ignored the comment and instead chose to look around the room. It wasn't tiny, but it was smaller than a double bedroom should be, and was painted completely a sterile white. The beds were brass painted white, with white covers, the drawers and shelves were white, even the flowers were white. The only splash of color came from the open window, showing splashes of green foliage and swathes of black pavement.

Black like the flowers. And white, white like-

"Where am I?" he asked quietly, rasping out the words almost painfully, longing for a glass of water. Black like flowers? But flowers were not black, never black. His mind swum in circles dizzily, leaving him feeling disoriented and oddly detached, as if he was simple a spectator to his own actions.

"You," the girl replied, a nervous tremor in her voice, "Are in one of the rooms at Briarson's Hospital. I've been told that you have been in a comatose state for two months." As she spoke, the girl walked towards the small door at the corner of the room, presumably the bathroom. As he found raising his head to be particularly difficult, and it only ended up with him becoming incredibly dizzy, he had to content himself with watching the crown of her head as she poured water from the sink. She even moved like a ghost would move, almost gliding over the floor.

"Two months?" he uttered hoarsely, voice rising in disbelief.

"That's right," her comments were very matter of fact, and she stayed just out of reach. She perched, birdlike, on the chair near his bed, her arms wrapped around her knees. "What's your name?" She sounded genuinely curious. "I've been sharing this room with you for two weeks, but they've never given me a name. They said they found you in the same spot they found me."

This girl seemed to have a tendency to ramble when she was nervous, he thought. That would make conversation much easier, as he was still having trouble forming coherent sentences. "My name is…" he paused, searched his mind for the answer. He came up empty.

"Don't know?" asked the girl, sounding resigned. "I almost didn't expect you to. I have the same problem, you see. "

His head swam dizzily, and he couldn't find himself able to reply. Memories swam through his mind, briefly touching and offering him the tiniest flash of insight, and then disappearing completely. No amount of concentration could bring up anything of use but faces, blurred and unrecognizable. Brown hair, then dark skin. Short moments of realization, and then blankness. Absolute blankness.

"Don't worry," the girl told him, those eyes staring at him knowingly. "You get used to it."

How could anyone adjust to this emptiness? To search for something in your mind and find it missing? He reached for the water glass once more and took a long drink of the liquid, concentrating on the cool feel of it against his lips and tongue. He stifled the urge to ask for something stronger as another wave of dizziness took him.

"I'm going to get the nurse now," the girl told him quietly. "Don't move."

_drip_

And when he looked up again, the girl had gone.

* * *

She had woken up in a room of pure white, and her body had been a mass of aches and pains. Moving her head to the side, she'd noticed the thick bandages on her arms, legs, and around her waist. _But why? Why the bandages? When she removed them, there was nothing but healthy skin beneath…_ Her hair had been shorn close to her head, in a boy's cut, but the haircutter had not done a particularly good job. Bangs and a few tendrils along her ears had been left intact, and the hair was unevenly hacked off. But the pain in her body hadn't been as bad as the emptiness within her mind.

There were vague images of people she couldn't place. Places, like a school room, a certain scent, images and names that would pop up in her head at random, then leave as quickly as they had come. She was fourteen. She hated the color red. She had gotten in an Accident . That was the way everyone pronounced it, Accident. With a capital 'A', as if it was some sort of world-shaking event. As if there weren't so many other people in this hospital with the same or worse problems.

Alone except for the body of the boy she shared the room with. At first she'd thought he had been asleep, but the nurses told her that he was in a coma, and had been in a coma for months. He was older than her, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. His hair was incredibly light, almost white, and his skin was the palest she had ever seen. He looked almost like an ice sculpture, lying there perfectly still among the snow white sheets.

Something about him tugged at the retreating strands of her memory, telling her that she'd seen him before. She'd met this odd young man earlier, sometime before the Accident. She felt oddly wary whenever she looked at him, reflexively apprehensive of him, even though he could obviously do her no harm as he was. But her instincts told her nothing more, and she was so lonely in the tiny white room. She took to holding one-sided conversations with him, as though he could actually hear her. He was her confidant, and she told him of her classes, of her worries and fears, and of the vague memories beginning to stir in the corner of her mind.

That day she had read a book of fairy stories. One of the nurses had dropped it off for her, since she liked to read to pass the interminable hours in that tiny, white room. In her bed, she lived through the adventures of hundreds of noble princes and lowborn heroes. Dragons were slain before her eyes and castles were scaled as she lay among the white sheets, eyes following the words on the page with fascination. She was drawn to stories of princes in particular.

She'd finished reading the book of Grimm fairy tales that day, and was lying on her bed, staring at the blank ceiling as she wondered. Snow White, given a poisoned apple and made to sleep until a prince rescued her. She'd pictured the scene in her head, painting it on the ceiling with her mind's eye. A pale body, resting on a satin cushion, seemingly frozen inside a glass coffin. The prince clad, for some reason, all in white, a half cape fluttering behind him in a sudden breeze.

A kiss to break the spell.

She'd felt odd most of the day, almost detached. Like everything around her was some sort of odd dream, and if she pinched herself, she'd wake up in her bed, in some house in the suburbs. Though for some reason, she couldn't fit parents into the picture. There was an adult figure…female, with short hair. Motherly but not a mother. Nothing else but that.

So after reading the story, staring at the ceiling, she'd wondered about the kiss. It was ubiquitous in the fairy tales she'd read. The princess under an enchantment was given a kiss by the hero, and had their enchantment broken. Why a kiss? What was so special about the kiss?

And for some reason, she found herself looking at the still figure of the boy she shared her room with.

_Kiss to break the spell, and the sleeping princess with skin as pale as…_

_But no, the princess in her mind was never pale, and the boy on the bed was not a princess…_

But he did lay as if under a deep enchantment, never moving. His sheets were as stiff and unwrinkled as they were when she'd first awakened in her narrow hospital bed and looked at him, her silent room mate, an ice statue on a bed of snow.

She'd rose from her bed, walked across the room to his, and knelt next to him, studying his face. Up close, he looked odd, older maybe. Young-old, with faint worry line wrinkles on his brow and a fall of nearly white hair, but a boyish face and features. _And the prince knelt by the glass coffin in which Snow White lay._

And _that_ sounded right, for the whole hospital seemed to be an enormous glass coffin, colored in pure, sterile, unyielding white, with even the scenery outside a watery crystal grey. The plants grew brown here, and sprouted colorless fruit. "Do you need a kiss to break the spell?" she'd asked him quietly, her voice no louder than the barest of whispers.

Of course he didn't answer. The silence spun around her like a shroud of brittle white and grey clouds. It felt like no one on Earth was alive or awake or even real. It was one of those moments. And she leaned down slowly, inch by inch, her eyes watching his face, his frozen, unmoving face, until her lips just barely brushed his. His skin was warm.

She leaned back from the bed.

His eyes opened.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

Yes, I know. There's already a 'graduation' story out by this name. But I've been working on this idea for months, and I thought Chrysalis would be the perfect title for the story. I really couldn't find another, no matter how hard I tried. Please forgive me, Vic Woo.

No, I don't think this will be a Mikage/Utena coupling story, even though there is a kiss. Let's just see how it goes, shall we?


	2. Tissant

**Chrysalis**

Chapter One: _Tissant_

* * *

Perhaps weeks had passed. Perhaps months. Perhaps it had only been a day. Time in the hospital passed slowly, minutes dragging out for eternities, days seemed to go on forever. The only things that broke up the monotony were sessions with the therapists and daily meals, some of which he deliberately missed as he felt unable to eat. Even recent memories, those he spent with counselors and doctors, even with fellow patients, all seemed to blur together. It was like living in a dream.

Some days, it felt that everything could stir up a memory. Not a memory, as such, but the very end of a ribbon kite string, the kite of memory being tugged slowly away, out of reach. The taste of an apple, and there was the tug, the faint rippling surface of a memory, there and gone again. A brush of his hand against a sheet, the feeling of hair falling into his eyes, even the clouds streaming past the window offered him a string to pull, but never allowed him to really touch what they meant. Dreams were haunted with memories and unrecognizable images, pictures that seemed to have nothing to do with one another. He'd wake up in the middle of the night, with the memory of the dusty scent of dried flowers, or the eerie blue glow of a tank lighting up the face of a young boy, who seemed both dark and light colored. He woke up with the memory of green eyes haunting him, phantom lips on his mouth and his heart pounding as though it would break free of his chest.

Once he'd woken up, out of breath, tears burning the corner of his eyes. He'd thought he smelled smoke, sharp, pungent and scorching. The dream-remnants of lit ashes and embers floated before his sleep-dazed eyes before he realized where he was. The room itself seemed as insubstantial as the nightmare he'd just awoken from. It was an odd feeling, lying there in the narrow, white-sheeted hospital bed, and watching the moon through the sheer curtains shrouding the window. At first he thought that window had been left open, the curtain floated and billowed, looking like a wraith, a ghost of some departed child. He blinked, his eyes still foggily unfocused from sleep, and saw the dull sheen of the moon's light on the glass.

The smoke and ashes scent of the dream still lingered, and he felt sick. His throat was dry, and his mouth felt as though he'd eaten sand before going to bed. He had a fleeting and intense desire to open the window and be able to breathe clean air, at least. The room felt musty, stuffy, cramped. The air felt like it was burning. He fairly leapt out of bed, rushed to the window, turned the knob at the bottom, and yanked it up with a faint creak and a dry whooshing sound. Clean, dry-scented air wafted in, carrying the smell of the grass that had just been freshly trimmed. He could breathe again.

He shared the room with the girl, who was also suffering from amnesia. Apparently, since he'd been comatose, the problem of male and female cohabitation hadn't come up, and when he'd pulled out of his comatose state, no one seemed to find any reason to separate them. Perhaps they were still clinging to the idea that she and he may be siblings or at the very least relatives, he didn't know.

The girl had been found at the exact same spot as he had, but in considerably worse condition. He had questioned the nurse about the event, but she'd simply answered that her injuries had been extensive, and that she was, for the most part, healed physically. He'd gotten the impression that her body's healing had been extremely swift.

However, she was still in the same condition, mentally, that she'd been in when she arrived. None of the doctors or nurses here were given to long or detailed discussions with their patients, and so he didn't know anything specific about what ailed her, or even _himself_ for that matter. The girl told him that she really had no interest in what her condition was called, so long as she 'got over it soon'. She'd been in one of her better moods that day, brighter and more active than she usually was. It was probably a brief view of the person she had been before whatever accident she met had changed her. Talkative, and ever-so-slightly mischievous. Unlike her usual mood, a faint melancholy that was emphasized by her gestures and movements. He was finding that he was very adept at reading a person's thoughts and mood simply by expressions, voice inflections, and even body language. He'd idly wondered once or twice where he'd picked up the skill. Anyway, in the case of the girl, she left her emotions so clear and open, she may as well have painted them in block lettering on the walls.

Most of her time was spent sitting at the window, curled in on herself like an infant in the womb, and staring outside at some unknown point in the horizon. She looked like a kind of specter, pale, thin, and black-clad. At times, she would sit on her narrow hospital bed and draw, a look of intense concentration in her eyes as she wielded the pencil and pressed it heavily onto the parchment paper. She drew roses often but they were sharp and angular, overlaid with designs reminiscent of swords clashing. At times, she would draw the silhouette of a woman with her face covered in shadow, long curly hair falling like silk over the jagged roses.

The drawings interested him for reasons he didn't quite understand. They were not well crafted, their compositions flawed, their perspective skewed, and yet somehow they caught his eye and held it. Once the girl had found him staring at one of her pictures, this a picture of a high, crooked tower of stairs, with jagged roses creeping and climbing all over it. She'd caught him holding it and gazing at it fixedly, feeling that he must have seen that picture from somewhere. The girl had laughed and asked him if he wanted to keep it. He didn't remember his response, something noncommittal about him liking pencil drawings.

Which was untrue, actually. He hated pencil drawings, graphite, charcoal, or other such sketchy media. They seemed blurred, smudged and unclear. He liked drawings detailed, clean and neat. Line drawings in pen and India ink were what appealed to him, but the girl claimed that it was too 'fussy' a media for her to work with. She loved free strokes, wide and rough. She'd work with watercolor as well, swathes of murky green and blue surrounded in stabs of red and fuchsia. Lilies or some other sort of flowers, a change from her usual parade of roses.

The girl hardly talked to him. Instead, she talked _at_ him, rambling about things she vaguely remembered of her early childhood, things she had learned that day, and anything at all that could possibly be spoken about. Sometimes he would nod, or quietly put in an opinion of his own, but the girl seemed to ignore the little input he would give her. He found himself wondering if she had spoken to him when he was comatose, having a conversation with a body that could not hear her or answer back.

At the moment, she was speaking of arts and crafts, while sketching yet another drawing of her roses. Her hand traced the outline of a petal as she spoke, her hair falling into her eyes.

"I've decided not to work with colors anymore," she explained to him earnestly. The black and white conte crayons she was working with seemed to illustrate her point.

"Hm," he answered, buried in a book he had discovered in the small library the hospital possessed. It contained a number of Shakespearian plays, complete with notes hastily sketched in the margins of the pages. At the moment he was going through 'The Tempest.' He seemed to remember not being interested in novels and plays before, being more interested in science and mathematics than literature, but there seemed to be a delicate kind of science in writing, and Shakespeare's works were interesting, if not incredibly realistic. Pulling away from the book for a brief moment, he glanced at the girl, who looked at him as if awaiting further comments. "Why?" he asked her, almost interested in her reply.

"It's less complicated that way," she bit her lip in thought. "Well, that too, but I think it's better in black and white. Colors are tricky. You have to use them just right, or the picture won't turn out right. Black and white also seems more…dramatic somehow." She scribbled as she spoke, the tip of the conte crayon scratching over the paper in sharp, definite strokes. He watched the point of the crayon add lines, watched as the drawing grew shape and definition. One more stroke of the crayon, and a wistful pair of black and grey eyes gazed out from the paper, staring at him.

"Hm," he said. It didn't matter if he said nothing. The girl would continue to talk, simply to fill up the silence.

The drawing was only half finished, and it showed the mournful silhouette of a dark-haired child, arms outstretched. "I'm kind of hungry."

He shrugged, disinterested. "We should be getting food soon."

"I'm tired of being _brought_ food. It makes me feel like an in…in…" she bit her lip, searching for the word.

"Invalid," he offered, not lifting his eyes from the text he was reading.

"Right," she said. "Like I can't do anything for myself."

He turned a page without replying. In truth, he didn't like it either, for different reasons. He was a loner by nature, he didn't like speaking or associating with people. The assorted nurses that brought them food or books, the doctors he spoke to, all made him uncomfortable. He'd rather be away from here, memory or no memory. The girl was undaunted, as usual, by his lack of response, continued discussing the matter at hand.

"It's not like I sprained my ankle or anything…" at that she trailed off, her expression changed. She looked as though she was listening to something very far away.

"Or anything?" he prompted, after a short time had passed. Once in a while, either of them would dredge up some memory, and eerily often, the memories were similar. For example, both of them dreamt or had flashes of a very large building, something that looked like a palace or museum. The girl was of the opinion that it was a church they'd both been too, because she told him that she remembered the toll of bells whenever she thought of it.

The counselors encouraged them to speak to each other of whatever they remembered. They believed that he and the girl were related in some way. He had to admit that they looked quite similar, both had fair hair. However, his was a much paler color. Pink light enough to be considered white, especially compared to the rose of the girls' hair. She often compared the hair colors to candy, smiling as she did so. "Peppermint floss", she had said, taking a few strands of hair in her hands, "Your hair is like peppermint floss. Just enough pink to make it so. And if your hair is peppermint, mine is cotton candy." Then she'd laughed and let go of his hair, ignoring the disgruntled expression on his face.

Both of them had light eyes. Both had fair skin made lighter by the time spent indoors, although hers still had the faintly tanned look of someone who had spent much of her time in the sun. Even their height was nearly the same. It was uncanny, even by his standards, but he doubted that they were related. For some reason, he felt that he would have remembered.

"No, nothing," she replied, still looking a little dazed. "I just remembered I sprained my ankle once at school."

"You should write it down," he said in an uninterested tone, returning his attention to the book.

The notebooks were an idea of their therapist, who firmly believed in the idea that dreams were a result of the subconscious going through past events, and theirs revealed a lot of their memories. He'd also told them to write down any flashes or ideas they may have during the day.

"Not important enough." she replied. "I mean, spraining my ankle? Lots of people sprain their ankles. It's not important at all. I'm sure you did. Sprain something, I mean."

"I doubt it," he replied, turning a page. "I'm not too interested in athletic activities. In fact, I don't much like the outdoors."

"How come?"

He sighed and put the book down, seeing that he would get no peace until he'd explained. "Firstly," he began in a didactic tone, "I'd rather spend my time working indoors on a computer or engaging in intellectual activities. Second, I'm not and never will be as …physically fit as some people. I'm not built for it. Third, I don't like being in bright sunlight. It hurts my eyes."

She had been nodding slightly at his first reasons, even though she didn't look like she accepted them as valid. When he stated the last, she blinked in confusion. "It does? Why?"

"I'm an albino," he noted her confused expression. "Shouldn't it be obvious? Pink eyes aren't exactly _ordinary_."

"No, it's just…well what's an albino?"

He didn't think it was that uncommon a term, but he folded his arms and began the usual recitation. "People with albinism, or albinos, are born without pigment, especially melanin. Melanin is photoprotective, and protects the skin from ultraviolet rays. Put simply, it keeps your skin from being sunburned. It also helps the eyes develop, and since I'm lacking in it, I'm nearsighted." He sensed her next question. "They ran some vision tests on me here, and fitted me with a pair of contact lenses, but those don't help against the sunlight." he paused as a thought floated up to the top of his thoughts. "I …remember that I used to wear tinted glasses for protection as well as the conventional vision correction, but I don't know what happened to them. Perhaps they were broken after the accident," he added, with a niggling feeling of doubt.

"Well, still. Don't you ever want to go outside? I mean, do you ever wish you could?" The girl was gnawing her lips nervously as she spoke, as if she feared upsetting him. "It doesn't seem…fair."

"Frankly, no. Why should I?"

She glanced up at him, eyes wide. "Well, there's running and stuff. And just lying out in the sun. I used to…love to do that, I think. I remember…just lying in the grass with my hair spread all out," she fingered the shortened locks of her hair as she added this detail, but it didn't seem as though she knew she was doing it, "And I would just relax and look at the sky. The sky on a bright, sunny day is just beautiful, you know? A lot of times it doesn't have clouds, and then it's just this long stretch of blue."

"I can look at long stretches of blue any time I please. In textbooks. They're not really very impressive."

"That's because you've never seen it in real life, I mean, you've never just…gone out and looked at it," she waved a hand expansively at the curtained window. "Well, how about going to the beach? "

"Sand gets everywhere and I sunburn easily. I prefer a nice, clean room and a textbook on scientific theories."

She sighed a long, gusty sigh. "I don't know, it just doesn't seem right."

He smiled faintly. It wasn't right to her that a person didn't have the chance to go out and do something that he had absolutely no interest in doing. "Mm," was all he said, a noncommittal sound. She seemed to take this as consent, and did not pursue the matter further. Her attention span wasn't short so much as it was selective, he noticed. Problems she found she could not fix, ideas she didn't understand, all of them were troubled over for a short time and then tossed carelessly to the side. Those problems that she was capable of solving were obsessed over until they were resolved. When they were done, she'd move on to the next, with no sign or acknowledgement of her achievement.

The picture in her hands was gaining more detail. The child in the drawing was given a sketchy sort of dress, the frayed and broken lines making it seem ragged. Looming up and behind the child was something that looked like a broken stained glass window. No floor was visible, making it look as though the girl was floating in midair.

She caught his glance at the drawing and gave a sort of shrug and smile. "I'm going through a lot of pencils a day. It's nice of them to keep giving me paper and stuff. I thought they'd limit me to, I don't know, three sheets a day, but they're really good about it."

"It's not that they're generous, I think," he replied. "Most likely they think that it's another form of subconscious expression and those drawings of yours are actually scenes from your repressed memories or symbols of traumatic events." He frowned slightly. "Which I believe is patently ridiculous."

She blinked at him. "How come?"

He gestured at the drawing. "Take that, for example. What is it a drawing of?"

"Well…" she looked at the paper in her hand. "A girl, I guess. I don't know. I really don't think about what I'm drawing, most of the time. I think this one's a little princess, though. And she's lonely."

"Well, feelings aside. Is it remotely possible for you to have met a princess in your life? And unless you are severely anthophobic, I doubt those ceaseless rose pictures of yours have anything to do with your trauma. I am not an expert on archetypes, but I do not believe a rose symbolizes anything remotely threatening or sinister."

"Love."

"What?"

"That's what they symbolize. I…read it somewhere, I think," she glanced at the small bookshelf at the far wall. "Not here, though. Anyway, I don't really like roses. I don't know why I draw them. It's this pattern, though, it's kind of stuck in my head. I don't draw it right, though. At least, the picture in my head looks kind of rounder, but I always draw the edges too sharp."

Amazingly, a mental image of something like what the girl was attempting to describe rose in his mind and he found himself nodding in agreement before coming to his senses. "In any case," he said abruptly, "Nothing you have told me seems to indicate anything that would cause you to repress memories. Flowers, princesses. It seems very normal to me."

"Well, what do _you_ dream about?" she asked pointedly. When he failed to answer, she set down her drawing and leaned forward, indicating that she would wait for as long as it took him to speak. "Well, I think it's only fair that you tell me. After all, I've been telling you everything about me."

"That is a different matter. I didn't tell you to tell me about it, and you did it of your own free will. I, however, don't want to discuss my own problems with anyone but the therapist. And even that is somewhat annoying."

"It's just a simple question," she persisted, looking slightly annoyed. "I just asked what you dreamt about. And you said dreams aren't real or memories or anything, right? So then they're not problems, they're just…dreams. Nothing wrong with talking about them." She looked proud about this deduction.

He sighed. It was obvious that she wouldn't leave him alone until he told her something, so he may as well get it over with. "I don't dream coherently," he began, searching for a way to describe it, "It's mostly a series of jumbled images. Mostly I don't remember my REM cycles- those are dreams," he added, seeing the girl's blank expression, "I wake up and that is it. When I do remember, it's mostly a feeling, image, or concept."

"And what _kind_ of concepts?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Dried flowers. A large marble building. A computer, a few faces, etcetera. Once or twice, I've dreamt of a very large room filled with coffins, but that's the most macabre example. Everything else is mainly normal."

She sat back with a disappointed expression and crossed her arms. "Maybe you worked in a funeral home?" she suggested slowly, then shook her head in obvious confusion. "Well, whatever it is, I guess you'll find out eventually."

"If the amnesia is from mental trauma and not physical brain damage, there's a possibility."

"Gloomy," she said with a slight frown. "That's what you are. I don't see why you have to be so pessimistic."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Don't you?"

"Well…alright. Fine I'll give you that." she made a tiny sketchy line on the paper, forming the kanji of a name, and then dropped it to the floor beside her and studied it, biting her lower lip in thought. "I don't know," she started again after a few minutes of gazing at her drawing, "I just…I'm tired of everything being so… grey. It feels like it's raining all the time in here, I don't like it."

"If you're bored, why don't you tell one of the nurses? I'm sure that a trip out of the hospital wouldn't be too taxing for our traumatized minds." He added the last with heavy sarcasm, glancing at the list of rules, laminated and placed carefully on the door. Her eyes followed his, and she gave a thin smile.

"Hopefully not." she agreed, and then full out _grinned_. It was the first completely happy expression he'd seen on her, and the effect was enough to take him aback. It wasn't so much the smile itself, a wide curve of the mouth, showing every tooth possible. Her eyes sparkled, her whole posture changed, every gesture exuding life. He was given a slight glimpse of what kind of girl she'd been before her accident.

And irritatingly, a vague feeling that he'd _seen_ that girl before.

"What?" she asked, snapping him out of his momentary trance. "Something I said?"

"No." he answered shortly.

But the rest of the day, all he could think about was that brief smile, and the thoughts that had come with it.

* * *

_Sunlight._

It felt like gold, streaming on her face and hands and warming her from the outside in

Of course, they'd been able to get sunlight, filtered through the thick window panes and half-shuttered in, blocked out by blinds and white gauze curtains. Then it came in as shoots of white, eye-achingly sterile. Like everything else in that room had smelled of liniment and band-aids, it was barren and lifeless.

Out here, even in the faux-winter greys of the landscape, the sun seemed to gain color, seemed to pick up a fresher, cleaner scent. It was like life pouring into her.

There was something about it that made her feel more _alive_. Had it always been this way, even before The Accident, or had the long stay in the grey of that hospital room caused it?

Outside the building, they kept small, ornamental trees, dark-colored things with tiny, waxy grey-green leaves and neat, circular beds of mulch. Grass growing around these trees was usually taller than the neatly clipped surrounding lawn, forming odd-looking fringes around each tree. There were no flowers, but they did have a few sculptures. Funny things, rigid and static and unyielding, modern art pieces made of tarnished bronze. They protruded directly from the ground, like huge jagged rock formations. Stalagmites, or was it stalactites that formed on the ground? She'd pointed them out to the boy, but he gave an uninterested shrug. He was always uninterested, it seemed. That was almost unhealthy.

She scuffed her shoe at a rock in her path as she walked, her mind still on the boy. Albino or no, staying inside away from the fresh air and stuff wasn't good, and it shouldn't be fun or pleasant either. Maybe if she asked the nurses for sunglasses and sunscreen or something like that, he'd be able to come out and look around the place with her, next time they were allowed out. It was definitely doing _her_ a world of good to get out and finally stretch her legs…

Stretch…

_/"Hey, watch this!"_

"_Oh, my, how wonderful…'_

"_I could always stretch like that. I used to be able to put my legs…"/_

Behind her head. She turned around sharply, unnerved. It felt like something spark-y and tingly, like the feeling when a leg went to sleep, had brushed right behind her head. Nothing there but the long stretch of brownish green that was the lawn to the hospital. Nothing, not even the dark-haired woman nurse who had sent her out here for a walk and had been supposed to look after her. The white, screened porch area that she'd been standing in front of looked completely empty, and she was suddenly struck by how quiet everything had become. Not dead silent, but the whispery, drawn-out, waiting silence that came before something big was about to happen.

She blinked uncertainly as she stared out at the empty lawn, brushing her hair away from her face. A light breeze stirred up the nearby grass, rippling her shirt around her. _Odd…_

In the corner of her vision, she saw a quick fluttering moment, and turned. A butterfly flapped its wings at her and hovered in its jerky way above her head before landing on the front of her shirt. It was pale yellow, with tiny brown spots flecked over its wings like freckles, and if she looked closely, its antenna curled slightly at the tips. She grinned in delight at it as it flexed its wings open and shut, like an animated decorative pin. "And what's _your_ name?" she asked it quietly. In reply, the butterfly opened and closed its wings twice and flew off, dipping around her shirt as it headed to greener pastures.

Not willing to take that from a butterfly, she started after it in a jog, running over the grass with a speed that just felt natural to her. She stopped that after her legs suddenly felt slightly wobbly, and the landscape around her started to blur and ripple before coming back into focus. After a few dizzying seconds of her falling to her knees and watching the ground move, she took a breath and steadied herself. "Those pills they gave me this morning must be really something…" she muttered, and got to her feet.

A few yards in front of her was a wood. Not much of one, it was more of a smallish-large clump of gathered trees, but it was big enough and wild enough to really look like one. The trees stood so close together, they looked nearly entwined, and vines laden with thick green leaves draped over the lower branches of all of them.

Like clothing, she thought. Or at least robes.

She walked a bit closer, hesitantly. It was definitely on the weird side, running into a forest on her first day out on the grounds. Especially, since she could have sworn she hadn't seen it when she'd been staring out the window all those times. Of course, the corners of the building could very well have hidden it from sight, or the curtains, or the little overhangings the shutters made even when open, rectangles of wood punched out of the landscape. Glancing back, the theory seemed more plausible. That was her window, or was it that one? From that side it would be hard to see, or was it that window?

She thought maybe she could see a tiny flash of pale hair in one of them, and waved at it. Probably it wasn't him, but it was fun thinking, just maybe…

She turned and faced the woods once more. Considered the possibilities. It was hard to see from the outside of the thick clumps of branches what was really inside the forest, but she could see one or two tiny trails leading into it. Squirrels or rabbits or little animals like that. Maybe a family, considering how worn down a few of them looked. And wouldn't it be fun to explore it, maybe climb a tree if the branches were right and wide enough near the ground?

There was a thinner area of vines just in front of her, cascading down the trunk of a tree. It had fallen and landed right smack against another tree, making a sort of triangle of the two trunks. _Like a door. _Mostly it was covered with leafy branches and vines, making a thick heavy curtain. _So, the vines are a kind of ivy. That's what it looks like, anyway. Only what kind of ivy? Flowering or normal or poison? Please don't let it be poison. Please, no poison ivy, period, no no no. _And she knew about poison ivy, having come down with a bad case of it once during…during…

Vacation? Or a trip?

Whatever it was, it would be hard to forget the pink, itchy rashes all over her arms and legs. Calamine lotion and oatmeal baths only did so much for it, and she'd been absolutely miserable until it healed. How _lucky_ for her to be _extremely_ allergic to the stuff.

A few steps forward and a hesitant examination showed that the vines were just the normal ivy and honeysuckle, completely harmless and really rather pretty. She reached a hand through and smiled in delight when it passed right through the nearly solid-looking wall of leaves to the other side. Into the forest.

For a moment, as she stood there, arm halfway through the vine curtain, she felt a brief sense of _déjà vu_, a feeling that another girl who had also been her had once stood before another forest, opening a different sort of gate. The feeling disturbed her enough to make her shiver before pulling back the curtain of vines and stepping, hesitantly, into the shadows in front of her.

It was like a fairy wood, the kind she'd read about in the storybooks up in her room.

Dust motes danced lightly in shafts of sunlight that seemed to stab through the tops of the trees, lighting up patches of forest floor. Tiny circles of pale white toadstools huddled near tree stumps and around the gnarled roots of trees rising from the ground.

And there were flowers everywhere.

They covered the ground in a carpet of dark green and purple, tiny, delicate little things. She recognized them immediately. Violets. There looked to be dozens and dozens of them, multiplying in the sunny areas, shrinking back into the shadowed places. She knelt down to look at them more closely, reached out and brushed a finger against their petals with a smile. She hadn't realized how much she'd been missing flowers.

"Hello."

For one crazy moment, she'd thought the violet had just spoken to her. With a surprised cry, she fell back on her rear, scrabbling against the bark and dirt on the ground as she turned to see the owner of the voice. It was a woman, dressed in a nurse's shift and jacket. She stood directly in the light of the 'doorway', one hand neatly drawing back the curtain of vines.

"H-hello," she managed, staring up. For a second she felt resentful of this slim woman, angry that she'd intruded on the one moment she'd had in someplace that wasn't dingy white and lifeless. Then she realized that, technically, she wasn't supposed to be wandering around this far from view, no matter how beautiful the scenery was. "Er," she said feebly, "I guess you were sent to look for me?"

"You could say that," the woman replied, making her way through the narrow, leaf-strewn path. Up close, she was less intimidating. She was shorter than her, with short brown hair and light brown eyes. Her features suggested that she smiled often, but at the moment her expression was one of calm amusement. "When you suddenly 'disappeared' from view, one of the other nurses sent me out to look for you."

"You're kind of young to be a nurse," she accused. Once the words left her mouth, she realized that she didn't even know how old this woman was.

The other woman laughed, "Yes, I suppose I look it. I've always looked much younger than I actually am. Hopefully, it means that I'll age gracefully," she gave her a brief smile before turning around to view their surroundings. "It is rather lovely in here, isn't it? I don't blame you for wanting to explore," her eyes drifted to where she sat in the dirt.

"Um, yes," she said, feeling as though some reply was necessary. "I didn't know there was one. A forest, I mean. Well, this isn't exactly a forest…I mean, it's really kind of a small one. But the rest of the lawn was very…well, boring, and I really didn't mean to wander so far away, and I'm sorry if I upset anyone."

"Dear, the hospital and grounds seem to be surrounded by a very high iron fence. With a lovely pattern of elaborate curlicues, I noticed. I don't think they're worried about you wandering far away. The head nurse simply noticed your path to the forest, and sent me after you." Without waiting for a reply, she knelt carefully in a small pile of leafs and debris. "Violets, hmm? Very pretty, though not entirely unexpected."

"Unexpected? What do you mean?" Her head was starting to hurt.

"Hmm?" the woman asked, seemingly focused on examining the small purple blossoms, "Oh, for the season. Violets usually bloom in springtime. Crocuses or another kind of wildflower might have been nice as well, but the violets seem to make this place so nicely colorful, don't you think?"

"Oh…yes, I guess so." she watched as the other woman brushed her fingers against the petals of the violets. It looked almost like she was talking to them in some way, petting them like a mother would a child. She didn't seem at all like the distant, hurried nurses and doctors of the hospital. "Er," she said hesitantly.

"Yes?"

"Who _are_ you?"

_/I am your/_

The woman's mouth formed an 'o' of surprise. "Oh, _excuse_ me! I haven't introduced myself. My name is Michiko Suzuhara. It's a pleasure to meet you," she bowed her head in greeting, sending a few strands of brown hair sliding over her shoulders and covering her face.

"A pleasure to meet you," she stammered, ducking her own head quickly. "I…I don't know my name," she added with an awkward wobble in her voice. She felt faint, almost dizzy. Like the world was swirling around her.

_/I am your flowerflowerflowerIam/_

"Yes, I heard," said Suzuhara-san's voice from a mile away, "I'm sure I look forward to learning it when you do remember."

Even feeling as though her brain had been put through a juicer and poured back in her head, she could make out the slight emphasis on 'when', and the fact that Suzuhara-san hadn't used 'if'.

"You see, I've also been assigned to you as your new therapist," she continued, "You and the boy you share your room with. I'm sure I'll be delighted to meet him as well."

Suzuhara-san said something after that as well, but unfortunately she had trouble catching it. That was, in fact, the end of their first conversation, as her headache and dizziness suddenly and anticlimactically turned into a full out fainting spell, and she had to be revived and sent straight back to her room.

Two chalky white pills and a nap later, she finally remembered the last words, and puzzled over them as she drank one of the huge glasses of water the nurse had left her. (They'd decided she'd been dehydrated.)

"_I've been waiting so long to meet you."_

* * *

**Author's Note**: Dear lord, this chapter took _forever_. I'm sorry for the lack of twenty-something pages as I planned, but I couldn't seem to get the plot to stretch quite that far. Sarasusamiga, I hope you're still reading this, this chapter's for you!


	3. Decouverte

**Chrysalis**

Chapter Two: _Decouverte_

* * *

_He was walking in a wasteland that stretched on past his line of vision and into a hazy, rippled skyline. The path he walked was made of dunes of soft, black sand that slipped and slid beneath his bare feet, and harsh, dry wind scraped against his body. He wore nothing, but was oddly unashamed. _

_He could sense that behind him lay everything he ever had been, and turning back was impossible. Before him walked a figure dressed in a long, black, fringed shawl, and its strings and strands scattered out in the desert wind. The figure carried a water gourd at its side, and left no footprints in the sand._

_Finally, he was thirsty, and asked the figure for a drink. When it turned, he saw that the shawl was not a shawl at all, but dark waves of hair against smooth, dark skin, and the figure spoke sadly in a woman's voice. _

"_You may drink, but you might not like its taste."_

A sound that he at first mistook for the grinding of metal against linoleum floors woke him. He sat up so quickly his head spun, and the room fogged into clouded black before coming into focus again. Silence hung in the room like a shroud. Cold moonlight poured through the window panes, lighting it like a scene from an old black-and-white film. A few minutes passed as he sat there, clutching the sheet to his middle. Just as he was about to dismiss the noise, the girl let out a low moan, which turned slowly into a wail.

He kicked the blankets off from where they were tangled around his legs and went to check on her, his feet freezing against the tile of the floor. When he reached the bed, he stopped short, static pin-needles of shock causing his head to spin.

The girl looked like she was trying to strangle herself with her own bedcovers. Her sheet was tangled and wadded around her waist and legs, and her body was shaking as she moved as though she was suffering from intense pain. He was afraid to touch her, her muscles looked strained enough that he imagined they'd snap if he or she made a wrong move. The sheets were cutting off her circulation, he could see the skin white and pale pink as the knotted fabric cut into her skin, but he couldn't seem to move his hands or the rest of his body to aid her. Her skin was wax-white in the dim light of the moon, and her face was twisted and fixed. In an instant, he suddenly felt that she looked like she was dying.

The faint, lightheaded feeling slipped away as quickly as though he'd been doused with ice water and he slapped a hand against the wall with the call button, although he realized it was more of an instinctual reaction than anything really helpful. The nurses must have heard the noise.

A soft, half-strangled sound turned his attention back to the bed. Her hand grasped his wrist with enough force to bruise, and he winced, trying to yank his hand back. Her eyes were wide open, glazed and dim, as if she was watching something that was far beyond the hospital room.

"…Save her."

He had to strain to hear the whisper. Her voice was hoarse and breathless, the kind of sound someone would make if they woke up with a severely dry mouth. Her eyes were still fixed on a point above his head, and he felt a thin wave of anger about the whole situation. "Who?" he demanded, "_There is no one else in this room_." The last sentence came out slow and forceful, a tone of voice used to talk to a babbling child.

The hand squeezed his wrist once more, spasmodically. "I need…!" And then she slumped, looking eerily like a puppet whose strings were abruptly cut. The sheets relaxed around her now that she was no longer flailing against them, and the marks they made against her skin showed up in faint bruise colors in the dim light of the room. He stepped back, and his fingers nervously went to his ring finger. He felt slightly alarmed when he realized he was wearing nothing there.

* * *

The nurses had shown up within a few seconds. They'd pestered him for information, made sure the girl was safe and in no danger of undergoing any other 'attacks', administered a dose of some strange medication, and hustled him into the bed. He quickly drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep, the rest of his night unplagued by the odd dreams he'd been having before. When he woke to the sounds of the girl bouncing out of the metal bed with the enthusiasm she'd slowly been gaining, he wondered if she had been having trouble sleeping, too.

When he'd been comatose, there'd been no reason to worry about the finer details and problems that naturally arose when a two members of the opposite sex shared a room. Now, with both of them awake and active, the staff had a few problems arranging things so that both of them had the privacy they needed for their morning routines. Separate bathrooms, for instance, became an issue, and the nurses had arranged things for the girl so that she could go to another bath in the morning and evening, while he kept the one in the room. She seemed to find it amusing, at least. She'd wrap a towel around her head, bring a robe, and announce that she was going to her bath house. The staff showed remarkable patience in their tolerance for this. In fact, they encouraged her when she slowly began to regain energy and a youthful exuberance that had been absent from her when he'd first met her.

The staff somehow attributed it to his presence, but he doubted it. Most likely it was a natural progression, the healing process going on at its normal rate. Perhaps another person to engage in conversation (at, not with, he reminded himself) was a catalyst, but most likely it would have proceeded at a slower rate with the same result. He noticed that the staff here had an unusual way of going about their treatment sessions. Before Suzuhara-san arrived, there had been doctors questioning him, but they never seemed to have a goal. Their questions were either vague or painstakingly specific, his name, address, where he attended school. Then, his favorite color, what he felt had occurred before he arrived, and what his basic thought were about his roommate and the hospital they were in. This was always anteceded by a progression of pictures. The sessions hardly went anywhere, but the psychologists didn't seem upset or worried about this. In fact, it was almost as though they'd expected for there to be no progress before they'd even begun the questioning.

"You thinking about something important?"

He glanced up and into the look of amused tolerance the girl was giving him. The cafeteria was mainly empty this late in the morning, but one of the head nurses must have informed them that they'd be waking up late. He'd been escorted by a matronly woman in a sternly starched uniform, who watched him beadily as he ordered a cup of tea. Not in the mood for the food, he'd waved away the proffered tray. Apparently, this was not allowed. The girl had a tray with two breakfast _tamago gohan_ on it, and his assumption was verified as she slid a bowl in front of him.

"C'mon, you're thin enough as it is. I mean, breakfast is supposed to be the most important meal of the day and all, and it's not going to do you any good skipping it. You can't live off of thoughts," she plopped down in front of him and broke open her chopsticks. "And I think Suzuhara-san is going to have a session with both of us today. Separately, obviously. I think. I don't see why she'd do it with both of us together, because we're two separate problems. Unless you really believe that we're siblings, and I don't think we are, we don't really look like each other in the face."

"It's a close enough resemblance for the staff to comment," he shrugged, "If they really wanted to know, they'd do a DNA test. I think they're waiting for the treatments to take effect first and using that as a last resort, though. You're correct, our facial features and overall physical appearance isn't that similar. Even the coloration is different, fair-skinned and blue-eyed doesn't necessarily equate albinism," he reached out for the Styrofoam cup of the hospital's bitter, medicinal-tasting tea, and took a sip.

"Mmhm. Not that I'd mind, you know. Having a brother, or even a cousin. Although it's kind of weird that both of us, are, well, you know."

He made some sort of noise indicating that he did, indeed, know, and wondered why she felt the need to skip around the issue. "How is your schedule for the day?" he asked, idly snapping his chopsticks apart. He still didn't feel the desire to eat much of anything, but he presumed he'd have to at least make a show of eating if the girl was going to continue watching him like a hawk. He wondered why he didn't mind as much as he would if she was a nurse or a doctor.

"Mm. Not too crowded. They worked on me a lot last night, remember, and they don't want me getting 'overwhelmed'" the quotation marks settled into place with two motions of her fingers, "So basically they took out some therapy time on the schedule and let me have some time to rest and…uh…recreate. Not that there's much to do. They're supposed to have a game room, you know. I _looked_ for the game room. If anything, I can at least play ping-pong. But all I see are hallways with door numbers for surgery or patient rooms and medicine cabinets. " She looked positively dejected.

"Have you tried asking one of the staff to assist you?"

She snorted. "Yeah, I asked one of the medical people a while ago. It's weird, but all their directions keep leading me in circles. Either the medicine they've been giving me is messing up my head, or this place is just built like a maze."

"Or maybe there is no game room," he suggested calmly. "Perhaps this is a place designed for the care of comatose patients, and they are not fully equipped to handle conscious ones. There are very few patients here that I have seen roaming the halls, and the size of this building is relatively small, for a hospital." He did find it unusual, though, that they had yet to meet any actual people aside from staff members in the building, but he hadn't gone into that train of thought. It wasn't important to him, or at least not nearly as important as the hundreds of other questions, more related to his own past and self, that plagued him.

"You're kidding," she sighed, slumping into her chair. "I'm regaining my energy and all, and yeah, I think that it's great to have more time away from all the questions, but…it's kind of boring, just sitting around and reading. Not that there's anything wrong with reading or anything," she added hastily, either reacting to his brief glance at her or the realization that he spent most of his time with a book or a notebook, "But that's good for other kinds of people, and I like to be playing more. Playing, like…sports. Only, there isn't a gym or anything that I know of…"

"There is. I have physical therapy in it," he interrupted the never-ending flow of chatter.

"Oh," she said, momentarily taken off stride.

"It's not precisely built for recreational purposes," he elaborated dryly, "Mainly it contains machines made to help restore the muscles after deterioration, or to help those who have lost limbs."

"Well, that doesn't help me. Back to square one," she said, poking her rice dejectedly. "You know, they could have at least given me a basketball. I…I think I must have liked to play back then. You know, when I was…who I was before I couldn't remember. I know that I know how to play it, and I know I really like it…like to run, too, and play soccer, and do track, and exercise. I can do loads of exercises."

"I've noticed," he commented. He certainly couldn't help it. It was a little unnerving to have her constantly stretch her muscles, something she was doing routinely now. He'd assumed it was something they'd prescribed to her, not something she was doing simply for the joy of doing it.

"Yeah," she continued, her usual habit of talking- there was a person in front of her, and so she'd talk to them, even if that other person wasn't communicating back. It made him rather curious what would happen if he left a mannequin in his place as she spoke. "Maybe if I ask, Suzuhara-san can get me a basketball or something to play with outside. You know they have a forest out there? I saw it a while ago, after I was chasing after a butterfly- it's absolutely loaded with violets. I like flowers, which is kind of weird."

"Why would you consider that strange?" he asked, since the general opinion that females liked flowers and feminine things was common.

"I don't…I just have the feeling, you know, that I shouldn't. That I never liked things like flowers or dresses and make-up, or at least, I started not liking them really early. I really don't like dresses, though. I had a strange dream that I was wearing one, but inside it there were thousands of those little plastic, sword-shaped olive-holders that they put in fancy alcoholic drinks- I used to see them in the restaurants, I think, and they were all sticking into me."

"That's…odd."

"I know. I wonder what that could mean? I was thinking it just meant that I think dresses aren't comfortable."

"You should ask your therapist about it. She should be more well-versed on the subject of psychology than I am."

She gave this a small amount of thought before moving on. "Hey, I was thinking," she blurted, "Since we're, like, in the same room and everything, and we talk to each other a lot…I mean, I'd really like to call you something. Other than, um, you. It's awkward just talking to someone but never knowing their name."

"I don't know my name," he replied blankly. Not the most intelligent answer, but he was having a little trouble keeping up with her shifting mental gears.

"I know. I just think we should come up with names to call ourselves, so it doesn't feel so strange. Don't you feel strange not having a name?"

He did feel strange, but hadn't realized the oddness until after she mentioned it. It did feel unusual to be a person without a name to answer to. Without a label. He'd said the psychiatrist might be better versed in it, but he knew a few of the basic precepts of psychology and sociology. One the lessons drifted into conscious thought. The human mind was not limitless, but limited in scope. Or perhaps limitless in the amount of information it could carry, but limited in the way it processed it. The human mind needed labels, simply because not having them was complex enough that the mind would simply continue processing huge amounts of information eternally. Labels made things simple. Many became one. And now, everything, all the data he contained and was had no name to contain it.

"Perhaps," he acceded, "What would you call me?"

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I think….I don't know," she said, looking troubled. "I think I know a name for you, but it doesn't come to my tongue. 'M'. It starts with…or maybe an S. But I know it. Ma…no, Mi. Or Miro."

"Miro." It felt awkward on his tongue, as though it was missing something.

* * *

"Do you know," she said, "That a butterfly, after it makes its chrysalis, turns into some kind of liquid when it's in there?"

Michi-san, as she'd asked to be called, smiled her tranquil smile and crossed her ankles as she wrote something down on her paper. "Really?" she asked, and the tone she used sounded genuinely interested, as opposed to the monotone or the vague disinterest the others had used. It made it easier to speak to her, made her seem more open and human, and not a moving piece of the hospital itself. Even the way she sat was different, sedately, and almost regally. Like a princess on a throne…no, she wasn't overbearing or snobby, but she had something in her posture that was quietly regal. She put her in mind of a school teacher, or some other sort of older, more sophisticated woman. Which, of course, she was.

"Yeah," she said, "Some of the books we have in there are about animals, and one's about bugs. I usually don't like bugs, but after seeing the butterfly I wanted to learn more. Maybe to find out what kind it was. I saw a lot of different types of butterflies in that book, but nothing that looked like that one. And it reminded me of something, but I forget what." she nervously clasped the handle of the file cabinet that stood near the plastic chair she sat in, sliding it open a fraction and closing it with a faint click. "I think it was about school, so maybe I learned about them in biology class, if I had that. But I don't think it was, because it wasn't a bug it reminded me of. Does that sound weird? I kept thinking of a person. And it wasn't like I usually do."

_click_

"When I think of people, I can sometimes think of a face. But then, I can't really think about it later. Or sometimes, I remember pieces of a name. But then, I can't really remember the whole thing. Not the surname or anything, I mean. Unless that's what I'm remembering. But for this person, I remembered that it was a girl who liked someone. Someone I didn't like, and she got in trouble with him. It's kind of exciting to remember that much, so I'm trying to write it down. So I don't lose it later. Like what I've decided to call myself. I don't know what my name was, but I can call myself something, and that makes me feel better."

_click_

"There's something else. Another girl, but it's not the one I was just thinking about. She was different. When I try to think of her, I feel like she's an old friend of mine. I think we used to be best friends, really. She just 'feels' like it, if that makes sense. But the other one, the other girl, I mean…I don't know what to think. It's like we were lots of different things at the same time. Once, I woke up angry at someone, and I think it was at _her_. But I don't think, you know, I was angry because of something she did to me, or because she said something. I was angry because of…something else. Maybe something she was doing to herself?" her last comment came out slowly and hesitantly.

She released the handle of the filing cabinet. "When I dream, it's the worst. And I can never make sense of most of the things I dream. There's something, I think, getting very close. Not a person, or even….much of anything. But I can feel it coming closer, and I don't know it's there until I turn around and see it."

"And then I wake up and it's gone," she ended.

Michi-san leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes briefly, as though a ghost of a headache had come and gone. Then she opened them and smiled at her. "Don't worry. It's good to see that you're making so much progress."

* * *

_The hallway was murkily lit by old oil lamps, and they lined the walls with monotonous efficiency. Light flickered and dimmed as he turned to make sense of his surroundings. He'd been in this same hallway before, but it was still terra incognita, as it were. He took a step forward, then another, and began to walk. Something immensely magnetic was summoning him down the hallway, and it was a strong force, an imperious tugging at his mind._

_Faint red stains appeared on the walls, gaining shape and clarity the further he traveled. The images burned themselves into the walls in dark black-crimson, the color of a new scab. The image of a boy, then a girl, then another boy. Alternating pictures, ones that were incongruous to the stories told by the others, and some that seemed to fit as smoothly as a puzzle piece clicking in place. As he continued moving toward the end of the corridor, a dim line of light that indicated a partially open door, the walls seemed to melt. The effect was similar to someone pouring water down every wall, lining them smoothly with shining wet,. _

_Footsteps sounded, and a boy appeared just ahead of him. Seeing him caused a ring of something like pain, and something like hope, and something that reverberated agonizingly through him. The boy swung his hand and both walls spiderwebbed with the blow and shattered, raining fragments of sharp images…sharp memories onto him. Pieces of a life._

"_I broke two mirrors, and only one of them is yours." that voice said. The time was frozen, and his lips did not move, though the voice sounded clearly through the halls. "You must find which of which belong to you."_

_He ran through the ruins, slicing his hands on the slivers he touched. _

"A metaphor," she said, snapping him out of the brief daze he'd been in. He focused on her expression, serene and professional, and clasped his hands together, lacing his arms around his crossed legs. It was the pose he felt most comfortable with, and he needed some amount of it as he sat in the room so clearly devoid of personality, listening to this stranger dissect his mind. He wasn't sure if it was more upsetting that he had to submit to these endless sessions that clearly accomplished little in the way of recovery, or that he indisputably needed the therapy. Or perhaps it was the fact that it was his brain that was malfunctioning, and not any other part of his body. The thought of his mind becoming so unstable, becoming untrustworthy…it was frightening. Genuinely disconcerting.

"A metaphor," the woman repeated, "the mind so loves them. Are you familiar with the theories of Carl Jung?"

He nodded, but made no verbal reply. Psychology was too vague a science for his taste, and the theories never interested him.

_Perhaps it was her voice that repelled him, or simply her personality. Aloof, detached, and almost pervasive. She was like a pin hidden in a coat sleeve, scratching the surface of his skin. _

"Such an intriguing man." she mused, "But it is _Freud's_ book 'The Interpretation of Dreams' that I speak of when I tell you this. What he theorized was this: the ultimate meaning of all dreams is wish fulfillment, the mind reaching to display what it would like to take place. However, the two opposing sides of the mind 'ego' and 'id' prevent it from being so easily and blatantly depicted, and the wish is therefore disguised in symbol. Nightmares particularly are signs of the minor warfare between the clashing sides of the mind. It fits this situation well." she smoothed her dress out, with a casual slide of her hands across her knees, and shifted her position. "Your wish is obvious. You want to regain your memories, but there is a logical or emotional part of you which, for some reason, has decided that some, or all of these memories are to remain hidden. The dreams you've been having are subconscious desires to solve that conflict."

"The boy," he said, suddenly. "I knew him."

"Yes," she said, "Although I wouldn't think too deeply about it. All people in your dreams are manifestations of your own mind. Perhaps you subconsciously decided it was convenient to know the boy, and so, in the dream, you did."

"No," he said sharply, slashing his hand in a dismissive gesture, "I _recognized _him. Even out of the dream, I know I have seen his face before." This in itself was unusual, for the boy's general appearance had seemed to be as hazy and tenuous as the flickering lamplight.

She seemed to consider this. "What do you think the dream means?"

He sat back in his chair, already grown tired of the conversation . "I don't believe it has any significance. In essence, dreams are a natural and logical process of the brain, a complex shuffling of files, perhaps. They're a manifestation of the mind's attempt to incorporate the sensory data into the memory. The central brain is engaged with transferring and decoding the procedural data stream…" he trailed off, "It has nothing to do with symbolism, and little to do with my lost memories. Those may very well have been wiped, unable to be accessed once more."

"Do you always refer to yourself as a computer?" she questioned, then smiled as he started slightly. "Don't be upset, I was only teasing. If you truly believe that your mind operates much like a complicated and sophisticated piece of equipment, then how do you explain your own interest and yes, recognition of the boy in your dream last night? It was an emotional moment for you, wasn't it? Even after you awoke. And as you said, the sense of familiarity continues. Do you think that boy could have been someone special to you?"

"I don't know." he said, clenching the sides of the chair.

"I see. Following your theory, it may be that your mind has retrieved a store of hidden 'data' and is now incorporating it into conscious memory. Does this sound like an adequate explanation?"

He looked away, towards the window overlooking the grounds. "I don't feel that I need to fully explain myself. I still do not believe that these meetings are providing any aid with my condition," he said, finally. Impatient, and growing more uncomfortable by the minute, he focused on the unchanging landscape of the hospital's lawn. He thought he saw a vague flicker of yellow.

"Your roommate shows signs of great improvement."

_Or the way she moved forward, like a hawk seeking out prey. Her relentless questioning. Her eerie grasp on his own personality._

He kept his gaze set on the pane of glass on the opposite end of the room. "Then her situation is not the same as mine, and can be treated differently with more success. My memories are irretrievably gone, and I have accepted that reality."

She laughed at that, surprising him. It was a low, throaty chuckle, sending needle-pricks of angry heat down his neck. "Have you? You are stubborn. You seem to be completely convinced in your incurable state, and will hear no other explanation or solution to the problem you face. In fact, you seem very persistent in making every argument against the suggestion that your condition is temporary. In short, you are in denial." Sunlight caught her face, setting her expression in shadows and angles.

Responding to an accusation of denial with another denial was clearly not an intelligent thing to do. "My hour is up," he noted in a colorless tone. His hands were still gripping the handles of the chair, and he released them as he stood.

"So it is," she noted, not bothering to stand up. She moved the pen erratically across the paper attached to her clipboard, and he wondered fleetingly what sort of notes she'd detailed of him. Suzuhara-san's gaze flicked upwards in his direction, as though she'd heard the faint echoes of his thought. "Your personal theories on your mental processes aside, I'm assigning you a journal in which to write your dreams. Please be sure to write in them directly after you awake, so they will be fresh in your mind. I've given one to Ten as well."

He didn't allow his surprise at her knowledge of the girl's assumed name to show. "Very well."

"She said you have a name, too. Would you like to share it?"

"It isn't mine."

"All the same, I'd like to hear it."

"Miro," he said shortly.

"I see," another scritch of the pen against paper.

He turned to leave the room, not sure if he felt relieved or disconcerted at her lack of response. At the threshold, she stopped him with a simple call to wait. He turned, impatient to leave. Something was wrong with the room, or perhaps it was her presence that made him feel as though he was developing acute claustrophobia. Rational sense dissolved under the endless monotony of the session.

"Miro, I'd also like for you and your friend to compare your journals," she said, setting the pen down. "It might prove helpful."

As the door closed, he caught a glimpse of her clipboard, lying face-up and shining in the pale light reflecting from the open window. He couldn't make out any writing.

* * *

"I don't understand why you're always so edgy after you see her," she mumbled through her hand, genuinely confused. She was lying on her stomach in her messy bed, the blankets wrapped around her waist and feet, a fan blowing her hair, chilling the back of her neck and her bare toes. Her right thumb was holding the page of yet another book on butterflies, her left hand was propping up her chin, her fingers spread over her mouth.

It was probably around eight o' clock, not that she checked up on their clock very frequently. It was dark outside, the sort that hovered around early evening, velvet slate blue, smudged with the faint green of daylight at the edge of the horizon. After spending much of the day in relentless pursuit of something to take her mind off of everything, she still hadn't managed to find a single lousy basketball. She counted this as a stupendous failure. She needed it, in a strange and possibly unhealthy way. She felt that it would be reassuring somehow to feel something familiar, to do something as common and everyday as play basketball, even if it was on a hospital parking lot where she was pent up because of a mental condition.

Tomorrow, she'd go running. Maybe with all the wind in her hair and the burn in her muscles and the ground giving way in front of her, she wouldn't have time to need to be lost in memories she didn't have.

She focused back to the subject at hand: Miro, doing his version of pacing or growling. He sat rigidly in a chair, working relentlessly on something in one of his notebooks. She'd seen the inside of one of them once and hadn't made any sense of the numbers and words inside. "I thought I was _good _at math", she'd said, puzzled, which had actually made him smile. She hadn't minded the joke being at her expense.

When he didn't respond to her comment, she shifted position, crossing her arms in front of her. "I think she's better than the one we had before. What was his name again? I can't really remember most of those people, anyway. They were all so…bland. But she's really nice. Or at least, she actually listens to what I'm saying. You know? She has this way of looking at you."

"Yes," he said quietly, "I've noticed." She looked at him, a little concerned. It sounded like there'd been some undertone in his voice, but she couldn't tell what it was. His expression didn't give anything away, but it was usually set in 'neutral'.

"She said she's going to find me a ball or a game or something. Isn't that nice," she continued, yanking at the strands of her hair as she spoke, "That was yesterday, when I was talking about my daydreams. Remember I told you about them. They're like, I fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, or maybe they're more like hallucinations. But they're not memories, sometimes they're just these weird pictures, and once I thought I was in another hospital room. But I also had this dream I was talking to her about…because she asks us a lot about what we dream about. I think it's part of the way she does her treatments and everything." she glanced at him again, and wondered why his expression was steadily becoming more fixed.

"It was strange. Usually there are people, or buildings, or scenery. But in this one, it was just me, alone, in the dark. And suddenly, there was this thin crack of light, and another, and I knew I was looking at a door. It started getting clearer when the dream went on, maybe my eyes started adjusting to the light or something, but I could see what kind of door it was. It was huge, and wooden, and it had a big, bulky, old-fashioned lock. And it was barred. In the dream I knew t was there to hold something back, something I was really afraid of, but I wonder why there was all that light behind that door. Now…now, I think it was like the sun was locked away behind it."

"Or you were locked away inside it?" he finally spoke up.

She paused. "Or maybe that," she said. "Is that what you think it means?"

"I don't think it _means _anything," he said, and turned back to his notebook.

Somehow, she knew she wouldn't be able to get him to talk for at least an hour. He was odd, or maybe the word was brooding. But she'd always pictured brooding to be the adult form of pouting, and he didn't do anything resembling a pout. He slipped into long periods of silence, where his mind seemed so far removed from where they were, she could sometimes imagine his brain ticking away in outer space while his body remained firmly on Earth. She didn't tell him that, because she knew he didn't have any imagination. Either that, or no sense of humor. It was most definitely a failing, as far as companions went.

His dry way of speaking made her want to make him sound interested, or speak with some kind of underlying emotion in his voice. Sometimes, she succeeded. Sometimes she didn't. But on some days,. When she was tired enough and miserable and frustrated enough, times when the relentless attempts to keep herself occupied didn't work, when she felt like she was locked away in a white and empty prison, and would stay there forever…times when she'd lay on her bed, sweat-sticky and ready to scream, he would sit in the chair beside her bed. He'd say nothing, he'd make no move to touch or comfort her, but he'd sit there and watch her. She sometimes wondered if it was his way of letting her know she wasn't the only one who was screaming.

* * *

_He took the gourd she offered him and looked at it for a long while before bringing it to his lips. The faintest taste of it made him jerk it away from him, dropping it on the sand. It rolled on its side, but no liquid spilled out._

_The woman watched him, her expression veiled by her hair, and she told him softly that she knew it was not time for him to drink. She told him that another would drink of it before him, long and deep, but that the drink was different for everyone, and for him it would be bitter._

"_What is it?" he asked._

_She simply turned and walked away. Her footprints were shaped like_

"Roses."

He turned on his side, breathing heavily, as though he'd been running, or drowning instead of sleeping. The moonlight showed the silhouette of the girl, outlining her in faint threads of silver-blue. She was also breathing oddly, a sound like choking, or hoarse, strangled laughter. Triumphant, and fearful. "I remembered. I remembered her name. She watered so many roses. They were everywhere, even inside of her. Anthy. Her name was _Anthy_."

A finger-light touch of cold brushed his spine.

Somehow, he knew he'd heard the name too.

* * *

**Sarasusamiga: **If you're still hanging on, that is. I apologize for the slow to update status of this story.

-Thank you for your correction of the word 'contagious', and Utena's writing 'her' name. Now you know which name she was writing: 'Ten'. There's a reason for that, but I'm sure you can guess it.

-Michiko Suzuhara is not a character from any other known universe.


End file.
